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The development of causation in Old English and its interaction with lexical and syntactic diachronic processes

Paper · 2013 · Javier Enrique Díaz Vera

Summary

The paper asks how causation, treated as a grammatical parameter encoded in the lexicon, shapes the syntax of Old English verbs. Díaz Vera argues that causation acts as a filter: it licenses some complementation patterns and rules out others. He also argues that each lexical domain handles causation in its own way, so Old English has several distinct "grammars of causation". He reconstructs the history of verbs in three fields: MOVEMENT IN LIQUID, PHYSICAL PERCEPTION, and FEELING/EMOTION. His method combines etymology (Indo-European and Germanic reconstructions) with attested examples from the Helsinki Corpus and the OED. The main result is that verbs within one field share a single path of lexical development and the same syntactic patterns, while different fields differ sharply. These differences track the degree of causation, read as how much contact holds between participants: SVO marks full contact, SVAdj with a genitive marks partial contact, and OVS marks none. The study matters because it links derivational morphology, semantic change and word order. The author admits a limit: a pattern missing from the surviving texts may be absent only by accident.

Key points

  • Germanic formed causatives with the suffix */-ja-/, traced to the Indo-European verb */ei-/ ("put in motion"). This gives minimal pairs such as dúfan–dýfan and cwelan–cyllan, the source of die–kill after Norse die was borrowed.
  • The same */-ja-/ formative also produced agent nouns, for example hierde "shepherd" and déma "judge". The paper sees a parallel: noun + suffix gives an agent, verb + suffix gives a causative.
  • Causatives of MOVEMENT IN LIQUID are heavy-root Class I weak verbs with the preterite /-d-/. They are transitive (SVO), while their non-causative partners are one-place verbs (SV).
  • Perception and feeling verbs are argued to come from body-part nouns plus */-ja-/:
    • híeran from "ear", félan from "hand/skin", byrgan from "stomach";
    • hiertan from "heart", lícian "like" from "trunk".
  • The examples are taken from the Helsinki Corpus, keeping its text codes, and from the OED, marked [§].

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Causative and non-causative verbs are paired explicitly as two subdomains of one lexical field, even when modern forms hide the link (die/kill).
  • I2. Degree of causation is read from argument structure as amount of participant contact (full, partial, none), each tied to a typical pattern.
  • I3. A semantic parameter is treated as a filter that licenses some complementation frames and blocks others, separately for each lexical domain.
  • I4. The author warns that a construction missing from a finite corpus is not proof that it is impossible.
  • I5. A single derivational formative is analysed as having parallel effects across word classes (agent noun versus causative verb).

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Compiled verb knowledge could store explicit inchoative↔causative links, so that "X killed Y" yields the state change "Y died" in the world of the text.
  • I2 (frames): Frame building could carry a graded "directness/contact" feature taken from the construction, separating make X feel from like X when assigning Agent versus Experiencer roles.
  • I3 (tree): Per-domain allowed-frame lists could act as soft constraints when a parser ranks attachment hypotheses, with the rejected frame logged as part of the explanation.
  • I4 (learn): Self-induced repair rules and silver-data filters should not treat corpus absence as a hard negative, but test such cases against negative controls before banning a frame.
  • I5 (tokens): Morphology analysis could tag derivational affixes with an abstract semantic contribution shared across categories, helping lemma relations such as dark → darken.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of Castilla-La ManchaCiudad Real · Spain5 works · 38 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Javier Enrique Díaz Vera. 2013. The development of causation in Old English and its interaction with lexical and syntactic diachronic processes. Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 26.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18172/cif.2217

@inproceedings{vera2013development,
  title = {{The development of causation in Old English and its interaction with lexical and syntactic diachronic processes}},
  author = {Javier Enrique Díaz Vera},
  booktitle = {Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 26},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.18172/cif.2217},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18172/cif.2217}
}

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